The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by David Quammen

  The alley pinches down narrow at this end. The scaffolding, built out from the shell of the new building, makes it narrower still. Barely wide enough to get a car through. Across that gap, up here on the fifth story, someone with a dark and disturbed sense of humor has laid a two-piece aluminum ladder.

  Kessler stands at the parapet of this unknown building beneath him and wishes that the folk inside, whoever they are, might have heard his footsteps and right now be dialing the police. As far as he knows he is not guilty at this point of a felony; nor of suicidal stupidity, at least not yet. He gapes at the aluminum ladder, and at the cobbled alley five stories below. He is confused. He doesn’t quite believe that he will really be foolish enough to do what he knows very well he is probably going to do. He gawks. A plume of cigarette smoke reaches him in the dark.

  “It’s all right,” says a mild voice from somewhere close, though not nearly close enough.

  Kessler squints across. He explores the scaffolding with his eyes, picking over every shape and rectilinear shadow, peering hopelessly into the deeper shadows beyond, the ones that fill cavernous recesses in the open shell of girders and rough concrete.

  “Then you come over here,” says Kessler.

  He hears what might be a cluck of disgust. Or it might have been a pigeon. Or it might have been his own ears popping. Then a slender figure steps forward from the blackness onto the half-lit scaffold.

  The scaffold shifts slightly from the man’s weight. Kessler can see the ember of a cigarette as it glows scarlet from a final hard draw and then is flicked into the abyss; he goes a little dizzy watching the butt plummet. For an instant it seems that the man is indeed going to cross the ladder—good of him, very accommodating—and Kessler feels a wash of relief, though he is not sure that he even wants to watch. The man stoops over the ladder’s far end, where it rests barely overlapped onto the scaffold’s planking. He puts his hands on the first aluminum rung.

  “I have it,” he says. “Come.”

  This does not seem to be a negotiable matter.

  So Kessler goes. He goes on his hands and knees. The ladder feels strong; it gives back small tensile bounces of ghoulish frivolity against Kessler’s shifting weight; nevertheless he imagines it folding away at the midpoint like a drinking straw, falling, crashing, tangling itself through his own gnarled meat. It does not so much as sag. O upright ladder. Halfway across Kessler sets one hand on the brass fitting that holds the two sections locked, then realizing what it is he jerks his hand away fast, as though the brass were hot as a stove burner, nearly upsetting his balance as he does. Do not touch this brass doohickey. Do not bump. God knows what might happen. Kessler’s heart is now whomping away like a Buddy Rich solo. He concentrates fiercely on each placement of each sweaty hand. Meanwhile there is that sadistic little voice in his brain, already composing the headline: Man Splats Gruesomely in Fall from 12-Foot Ladder. Height of irony. The National Enquirer readers will love it. Distracted by these various mechanical and journalistic considerations, Kessler has all but forgotten the stranger, until he dares lift his face.

  Six feet away, infinitely distant, the man gazes back noncommittally. Long nose, mouth like a hyphen, eyebrows that seem to have been drawn with a ruler. It could be Veronica’s veil or a wanted poster. The eyes are fixed on Kessler as he crawls—not to encourage him, those eyes, merely to register and assess, to calculate and measure, possibly to judge. To decide. Calculate what? Decide what? It now dawns upon Kessler, heartbreakingly belated like most of his better insights, that he hasn’t just risked his life, in embarking on this idiotic little meaningless act of daring; he has presented his life, wrapped and sealed, into the hands of the strange man, for disposal or otherwise. Here. Do with me as you choose. No one will ever know. One good tug on the ladder from that side and yahoo, Kessler disappears like a Wallenda.

  He stops crawling. He has to study those eyes. It’s more important, at the moment, for Kessler to know. Worse to go on in suspense, another three or four handholds, and then be nastily surprised. The man gazes back noncommittally, his specialty. But evidently he perceives what has crossed Kessler’s mind.

  “It’s all right,” he repeats.

  Kessler crawls off the end of the ladder and across the scaffold and into the shell of the building, still crawling, still lightheaded, until he braces himself to his feet by leaning against a pallet of drywall. Pride has prevented him from hugging the stranger around the shins. The man has already lit another cigarette.

  As he did with Claude Sparrow, Kessler tries to place the man’s accent. The woman in mohair said somewhere east of Zurich, if she is any judge, but Kessler is not sure she is. At times, while the stranger speaks, Kessler suspects that he hears Norway. A minute later there comes a whisper of Brooklyn. Then stretches of bland mid-American English again, faultless and idiomatic. Kessler’s guess is that this fellow has a firm command of more languages than two, and can sound at will like whoever or whatever he might choose. He has introduced himself as Max Rosen, occupation unspecified, while implying heavy-handedly that he is an emissary to Kessler from no one other than Jedediah McAtee.

  “This is my interview with the Director?”

  “No,” says Max Rosen. And nothing more. He is thin, an inch or two over six feet, and faintly epicene in his fine charcoal tweed suit; he is more delicate, more the mental type, than he seemed by Kessler’s first unreliable impression. He wears round-lensed spectacles, the same sort of amber hornrims that Kessler associates ineradicably with John Dean, behind which the eyes are intelligent, quick, and unrevealing.

  “What, then?”

  “We can have a conversation, if you wish. Here. Now. When the conversation ends, it has never taken place.”

  “One of those,” says Kessler. “The truth is, those kind aren’t really much damn good to a person in my line of work.”

  He is bluffing. Max Rosen calls the bluff, with a wan shrug declaring his indifference to whatever Kessler might decide. Anyone who is quite that indifferent, though, doesn’t come out on a cold night to climb across rooftops.

  “I’d like to talk with you, yes. Sure. But I’m not granting any preconditions.”

  “No preconditions,” says Max Rosen. “Exactly.”

  “Why do you want to help me? Now, suddenly. What’s changed?”

  Though Kessler meant you in the plural, the answer comes back in the singular: “I do not want to help you.” Rosen repeats it, adding then: “And Claude Sparrow also does not want to help you.” The other thing those two seem to have in common, Sparrow and Rosen, is a humorless cold portentousness. “It is better that you should grasp that. Neither of us. We don’t want to help you.” Okay, Kessler believes he has it grasped.

  “You just want equal time.”

  “I offer you an alternative viewpoint,” Max Rosen agrees.

  Throughout the entire freezing hour, Rosen remains standing. He smokes a dozen cigarettes, each one lit off the butt of the last. Finishing one pack, he crumples it and tosses it out into space through an open wall, producing another pack from his jacket; in the bad light, with Rosen’s quickness, Kessler gets no chance to glimpse the label on either pack. Kessler himself sits on the stack of drywall, with his hands under his thighs to keep the fingers warm. Neither man has a coat. The plume of Kessler’s breath is nearly as visible as Rosen’s smoke.

  Unsure how to begin, or where, Kessler asks: “Did you work under McAtee back in the early sixties? At the time Fedorenko and Tron—”

  He stops, because Rosen is already flapping his head to and fro. “We won’t talk about Max Rosen,” says Rosen.

  Oh. Very well. Try again.

  “I’m interested in the Tronko case,” Kessler says simply.

  To this, Max Rosen nods.

  “And its context. And its consequences.”

  Rosen nods.

  “Up to and including the murde
r of Mel Pokorny.”

  Kessler would have thought that he had just made a provocative statement, or at very least a brash deductive leap. Max Rosen neither nods nor argues.

  “Sparrow has told me a lot about it. About Tronko, and how he was handled.” This doesn’t seem, to Kessler, a violation of any promises made or discretion owed to Claude Sparrow, and besides Rosen must certainly know that much, else he wouldn’t be here. Presumably the reports made by Lovesong and Buddyboy have had an attentive audience, if a small one, over in Langley. Kessler wonders just how much they do know over there. Merely that Claude Sparrow has been meeting with some journalist? Or have he and Sparrow sat for two days in the crosshairs of a fancy long-distance directional microphone? Sparrow is the one who should have foreseen and coped with that; he, if anyone, should have an informed sense of their capabilities. And it was Sparrow after all who seemed to care desperately, unlike Kessler, about being overheard. “His side of it,” Kessler adds. “I’m aware that there must be others.”

  Rosen does not deign to nod.

  “He also told me about Bogdan Kirilovich Fedorenko.”

  “Fedorenko was insane.”

  Only that. Rosen folds his arms, leaning back against a naked I-beam just three feet from where the floor drops away and the sky begins, without even any scaffold along this side. Obviously the man is an acrophiliac, Kessler notes. Who is he to call anyone insane?

  “Why?”

  Rosen squints wearily, raises a hand, drops it. What that seems to mean is: We won’t talk about Fedorenko either. Fedorenko has been declared boring or irrelevant—his whole corpus of testimony, evidently, beneath contempt. Kessler is still groping for a start.

  “What about Viktor Tronko? Was he insane too?”

  “No. Tronko was more complicated,” says Max Rosen. “Clearly he was a liar. Also he was very stupid, I think.” Just barely enough interest here to lift Rosen’s shoulder blades away from the beam.

  “Complicated but stupid?”

  “Yes. Oh yes, exactly. And then, also, quite often he told the truth. Viktor Tronko. But where did the lies end? Where did the truth begin? What was stupidity, what was cunning?” Rosen puts the cigarette in his mouth and removes it again without having inhaled. Kessler waits. Long seconds. When Kessler has been forced to conclude that the statement is complete, or at least ended, at that point Rosen adds: “Those are the questions to ask yourself.”

  “I ask you.”

  Max Rosen, wooden Indian.

  This is difficult. Also it is annoying to Kessler, precisely the type of situation that helped turn him to writing about tigers, giant squid, bird-eating Amazon spiders, and other relatively ingenuous creatures. Termites, with their dependable sense of social responsibility. Anything but humans—and least of all, humans of the clandestine bent. He appreciates now how right the man may have been when he said that, after their conversation, no conversation would have happened.

  But Kessler persists. Like searching for a screw lost in ten pounds of flour: you make careful strokes with a long thin knife, listening through your fingertips.

  “I’ve heard about the crossing. I’ve heard the first version of Tronko’s story. Sparrow called it the legend, I think. Rybakov. The wife and son. Young intelligence goon on the rise,” Kessler says. “I’ve heard about the honeymoon. Early debriefing. Gioconda and the Mad Monk on honeymoon.” Kessler waits.

  Max Rosen offers nothing, not even the dimmest hint of a smile.

  “I’ve heard that McAtee let Tronko run. That Tronko was indulged. At first. That he was allowed to stay drunk through that whole early period. Drunk or hungover every day.”

  Max Rosen nods. No secret there, no dispute.

  “While Sol Lentzer was debriefing him. I’ve heard about Lentzer. That he had first chance with Tronko, as McAtee’s chosen man. I’ve heard that Lentzer’s effort, that spring, was a total disaster,” says Kessler, pressing a little harder. “Worse than useless, according to Claude Sparrow.” He watches the other man sedulously.

  Rosen nods. “A wasted spring. Yes.”

  “I’ve heard they got nothing at all on Lee Harvey Oswald. None of the important information that Tronko had seemed to promise in Vienna. Nothing plausible. Nothing the Warren Commission could use.”

  He nods.

  “Nothing at all to persuade them that Tronko was real.”

  “No. That’s incorrect,” Rosen says. “You didn’t hear about the microphones, then.”

  “Microphones?”

  And now for a few minutes Max Rosen talks:

  In March of 1964 the American ambassador in Moscow held a press conference that grabbed headlines all over the world. He announced that U.S. security officers had uncovered forty-four hidden microphones within the embassy building there. These microphones had been planted within conference rooms, interview rooms, working offices of the political section. The ambassador’s own private office had even been bugged, by means of a wireless mike concealed inside a carven replica of the U.S. State Department’s official seal, which hung on a wall near the ambassador’s desk, and which proved to be not solid cherrywood but hollow. The seal had been a gift from the Soviet government, along with other items of decoration and furniture, presented when the American mission had moved into their new embassy building on Chikovsky Street. Twelve years earlier. Most of the other forty-three bugs had been built into walls or electrical fixtures, and had also presumably been stealing conversations for the past dozen years. They had escaped notice all that time, despite regular housekeeping sweeps by U.S. security teams, because they had been set in place behind alloy shields that made them invisible to electronic detection. The ambassador sent up quite a stink when he learned of them, according to Max Rosen. An indignant official protest was lodged with the Foreign Ministry. And then this dragging it out before the international press—a drastic step for the State Department—with the ambassador himself posing for photos, a pointer aimed on the hollow chamber within that perfidious seal. No one explained how or why, after twelve years, the Americans had only just suddenly discovered these microphones. The implication given was that detection technology had improved. The truth was that they were the first fruit of Viktor Tronko’s debriefing. Tronko delivered up the microphones as a goodwill offering, according to Max Rosen.

  “But Claude Sparrow didn’t mention them,” Rosen adds. “How interesting.”

  “It is interesting. Especially since something like that would be so easy to explain away.”

  Max Rosen gazes back impassively.

  “Let me imagine it from Sparrow’s side. Just hypothetical,” says Kessler. “I imagine him arguing that the microphones were a giveaway. A deliberate sacrifice by the KGB. If Tronko was phony, if he was sent, the microphones were an investment in getting him accepted. By you all. They were his dowry.”

  Rosen leans. A weary man.

  “What do you say to that?”

  “Your hypothesis is correct,” he answers.

  “The microphones were a giveaway?”

  Rosen scowls derisively.

  “No. All right,” says Kessler. “But that’s what Sparrow argued.”

  Face gone smooth again, Rosen nods.

  “How do you respond?”

  Again Rosen takes his time. “I don’t. There is no rebuttal to such reasoning. It is infallibly tautological. It can be followed out endlessly. The larger the sacrifice, that much greater must be the other side’s commitment to deception. That much greater must be the stakes. By this ingenious logic anything—everything—can be seen as the opposite of what it seems.”

  “Did Sparrow follow it out endlessly?”

  Rosen blinks, a languid blink that seems to indicate assent. He picks a mote of tobacco off the tip of his tongue and inspects it with the same intensity of attention he has given to Kessler’s last few questions.

  �
�Am I boring you?” says Kessler.

  Max Rosen shakes his head.

  “I’ve heard about the foreign junkets,” Kessler says, trying for a new start. “Rome and Vienna. Very unlikely that a man in Rybakov’s department would get those assignments, according to Claude Sparrow.”

  Rosen doesn’t choose to contradict.

  “I’ve heard about the apartment on Maksim Gorky. Tronko’s own home, but he couldn’t remember what it looked like. Got the woodwork all wrong.”

  Rosen is silent.

  “I’ve heard about Prague,” Kessler says. “Two visits. One a long internship, before he finished university. Then later, under cover as a translator. But Tronko couldn’t speak the language.”

  Nothing.

  “I’ve heard about Rybakov’s daughter,” Kessler fibs.

  Nothing. Patient, disengaged, Rosen only stares at him.

  “He lied about his rank, Sparrow told me.”

  Rosen nods.

  “Claimed he was a colonel,” Kessler continues. “On the Rome tapes he was only a senior lieutenant.”

  “Claimed he was a lieutenant colonel,” Rosen corrects him mildly. “Not a full colonel. Yes. It was a lie. As I told you, there were many.”

  “And some big ones, I gather. The whole business of his assignment under Rybakov, for instance. The assignment that gave him access to Oswald’s file. It may have been a complete hoax. A total invention,” Kessler states firmly, as though he were in any position to judge. “That’s what Sparrow suggests. Tronko couldn’t describe the offices. The elevators were out of place. He couldn’t give the first name and patronymic of—” Kessler stops. He tilts his head back, groping for that name. “Rybakov’s boss. Something with an S. It’s in my no—” He stops again, catching himself when it is already too late; for a moment he is visited with the certain conviction that, while Rosen entertains him out here, others are burgling his room, and that to mention any bit of physical documentation is only to invite its mysterious disappearance. He clutches for the notebook. But it’s right there, unmysterious and reassuring, in his back pocket. “—my notes.”